Recently in Successful Delivery Category

One paragraph in Item 1.224 in the section of the Budget papers on  "Reforms to support growth" more than makes up for my disappointment with what was not in the budget.

Section 1224 reads as follows:

"The Government is setting an ambition to make the UK the technology hub of Europe. To support technological innovation and help the digital, creative and other high technology industries the government will ...."

There follows a rag bag of initiatives, some of which may do some good, others of which are a waste of taxpayers funds. One diamond, however, sparkles amid the dross:

"... will transform the quality of digital public services by committing that from 2014 new online services will only go live if the responsible minister can demonstrate that they can themselves use the service successfully".

Will that mean a clean out of those ministers without post graduate qualifications in handling non-intuitive, man-machine interfaces?

Does it set a deadline of 2014 for the current crop of contractors to introduce on-line services, because after that they will face an acceptance test that they are almost guaranteed to fail?    
In the spring of 1971 my task was to help specify the processes to put on-line the sales ledger systems that I had just decimalised. In 1976, I was Sector Comptroller for Public Corporations when responsibility for debt chasing was devolved from the central financial services operation to the sales teams. My staff discovered that I had specified the system they now had to use. That on-line system had indeed been supposed to be capable of being used by the Finance Director - but nobody ever suggested he should be part of the acceptance testing.

Some-one clearly enjoyed slipping this recommendation in amongst the verbiage.

I could not care whether or not most of the other recommendations in the technology session of the Budget are implemented - but I very much hope that the Chancellor, Cabinet Office and relevant Commons and Lords Select Committees routinely ask to see the Minister's acceptance report - and they are available for all to see. And I look forward to Cabinet Ministers insisting that their Permanent Secretary goes first, before the junior minister who draws the short straw.

The day after the PASC report "Government IT: a recipe for rip-off"  we have the release of the strategic vision for Government shared Services . The good news is that it is very short so there is no excuse for not reading it.

The bad news is the mix of tunnel vision, inconsistancy and myopia in the "lessons learned" to date and the consequent two part strategy. There is a need for robust input to the Cabinet Office ERG team looking at plans to migrate to the future "model" lest this grow into another "rip-off".

Lessons 1 and 5) simplify to a contradiction. independence is an important incentive but efficiency gains are proportionate to the level of mandation. If you have to "compel" then it is probable that the incentives are wrong, or the policy is wrong, or both.

Lesson 2) Delivery of shared services is no more a core Government skill than the delivery of anything else, but Government has greater potential for economies of scale than anyone in the private sector. Most of the savings form shared services relate to HR and Payroll. The private sector has outsourced these because of the complexity of government imposed tax and employment legislation. The savings from a holistic approach to simplification and standardisation in co-operation with a panel of major private sector employers (not consultants) would be worth a tax cut of tens of billions in helping stimulate UK economic recovery - as well as cutting tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions from HMG spend.

Lesson 3) Charging structures are indeed one of the main excuses for not sharing services across departments - but that is because of the lack of incentives for finding efficient and equitable solutions compared to those for resisting change. The answer is to change the blance by providing more interesting, secure and/or better paid futures for all who help.

Lesson 4) Shared services do indeed comprise a range of standardised components - and the way to bring this about is to focus on inter-operability standards so that the components currently available can be brought together in solutions that evolve over time.

There is also a need to look at the lessons from local government and  the private sector with regard to those "sharing" exercises which led to improved service at lower cost and those which did not. There is also the experience of major private sector players like IBM, which came back from near death by spinning out, rather than outsourcing, functions that were not core to its business. The motivational effects of such a policy are very different. So too is the subsequent quality of service.  

 

The coalition government has said that the days of big IT projects are gone. But IT projects do not come much bigger than the DWP plans for a Universal Credit. How can we ensure that it is as successful as the original computerisation of PAYE under Nigel Lawson and Steve Matheson? I have covered the reasons for that success several times. Most recently in a blog last year. But time has moved on and an additional idea, not really practical in the early 1980s, may help ensure that the Universal Credit is a similar success.

Ministers are talking of massive decentralisation to save money except for procurement where there are supposedly massive savings from bulk buying or ICT, where the savings from systems inter-operability and the re-use of previously purchased software can be substantial. But are such savings, incluidng with regard to ICT, more than wiped out by the tiers of overhead and inflexibility along the supply chain? 

The Cabinet Office draft structural reform plan is curiously unambitious in some areas (for example the £6 billion savings targets set for the Efficiency and Reform Group) and  centralist in others. This implies a risk that the Return of the Jedi will indeed be followed by "The Empire Strikes Back", rather than the other way round. Thus the plan is to abolish or bring back in house those Quangos which are not technical, transparent or impartial. There appears to have been no option of removing their statutory powers and leaving them to sink or swim as self-funding co-operatives, competing to provide services valued by those running front line delivery. Instead some of these look set to fall through expensive cracks, as functions valued by no-one, as well as those which should never have be devolved, are transfered back to departments whose previous failures led to the rise of the quangocracy in the first place. 

What do you call an industry which does not plan for the inevitable? Like Y2K the cuts in ICT spend announced yesterday were inevitable. What was not inevitable was the rush of buyers and suppliers into a final round of big-bang deals that were bad value for taxpayers and shareholders alike and will have to be unscrambled.  Rather than bemoan the reasons why ICT turned from White Knight into Whipping Boy I would would prefer to ask "How many suppliers have the wit and will to help turn a potentially terminal crisis for their UK public sector operations into an uprecedented opportunity for mutually beneficial change?"  

 

      

In the early 1980s I had to turn round the NCC Microsystems Centre when the DTI funding vanished in a typical government double-counting operation. My staff - I merely encouraged them - managed to stop the bleeding and to grow the operation, on positive cash flow, at 80% p.a. compound. About the same time I became an advisor to the High Tech Unit of Barclays Bank. I remember persuading the bank to give a stay of execution to one software house which was having to do likewise, after a major customer had gone down leaving the bills unpaid and another, whose strategic partner had pulled out of the UK.

I spent much of yesterday in meetings planning how to help local authorities and their suppliers cope with similar pressures over the year ahead. The first step will be to give confidence to local authorities and agencies that they can legitimately do short order procurements to make innovative use of IT to remove bottlenecks, improve service and free up funds for investment in shared services to make further savings - and so on.

 

Further to my blog yesterday, those wishing to ponder the future of NHS IT could do a lot worse than look at the previous Conservative policy statement in response to the independent reivew of NHS IT commissioned by Stephen O'Brien. That review addressed questions raised in an earlier, rather less detailed and thoughtful (only nine pages as opposed to over 180 for the independent review) study by Centre Right Think Tank Aediles. The title of that paper Computerising the Chinese Army summarised the problem. The "solution", a mix of devolution, choice and inter-operability, was another of those areas where Conservatives and the LibDems were in strong agreement even before current love-in. Implementation is another matter - given that so many trusts are constrained by impossible service contracts and bankrupt in all but name.

 

One of the sadder features of the General Election was the failure of so many candidates with a solid understanding of the world of information systems to be elected or re-elected. Several came so close that I hope they will be successfull, when the National Government falls apart: whether over failure to agree savings that satisfy the IMF, the timing of the referendum on electoral reform or the immunity of MPs from having their broadband cut-off after their children have downloaded ...

 

Computer Weekly and others are publishing summaries of the technology policies of the main parties and collecting shopping lists from interest groups. How do they compare? Not well. All parties are going to provide broadband and efficiency but say little about how, save that they are going to halt big IT projects and go open source. However, the manifestos say little or nothing about the need for rapid and effective action to improve workforce skills and professionalism, both in-house (Government as an intelligenct user and efficient buyer) and across the IT industry at large.